You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.
I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.
While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.
If you keep taking stabs at utopia
sooner or later there will be scars.
Suppose there was a thermometer able to measure
contentment. Would you slide it under
your tongue and risk being told you were on par
with a thirteenth century farmer who lost
all his teeth in a game of hide and seek? Would you
be tempted to abandon your portable conscience,
the remote control that lets you choose who you are
for every occasion? I wish we cared more
about how we sounded than how we looked.
Instead of primping before mirrors each morning,
we'd huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.
As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in
pieces,
that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven,
waiting for the rest of him to arrive, as if God
was dismantling him like a jigsaw puzzle, but now
I understand we're all missing something. I wish
there were Band Aids for what you don't know, whisky
breath mints for sober people to fit in at wild parties.
There ought to be a Smithsonian for misfits,
where an insomniac's clammy pillow hangs over
a narcoleptic's drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic
displayed like a white picket fence designed
to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House
was made out of mood ring rock, reflecting
the health of the nation. And an atheist hour
at every church, and needle exchange programs,
and haystack exchange programs too, and emotional
baggage thrift stores, a Mount Rushmore for assassins.
I'm sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream
of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire,
no asphalt, no rest stops, just a bunch of dead grass
with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.